17 Wikipedia Country Report
To start things off, I thought it was important to look at the presence of Wikipedia in China. With China having an authoritarian government, it is very difficult to access any websites or information that may not align with their views. Wikipedia is actually a very good example of how restrictive the Chinese government can be when it comes to outside news. Wikipedia has been intermittently blocked in China since 2004. The Chinese language version of Wikipedia was then blocked permanently in 2015. Finally, all versions of Wikipedia were blocked in China starting in 2019. With Wikipedia now being fully blocked in China, one must use a VPN if they want to access or edit Wikipedia in China. Because of this, there are no accurate estimations as to how many people actually in China are using Wikipedia or editing it. The Chinese equivalent to Wikipedia is Baidu Baike. This page is only semi-regulated and seems to be the preferred collaborative online encyclopedia for Chinese people.
The English Wikipedia page on China is quite comprehensive and covers the basics of any topic related to China you could think of. However, when I compared the English page to the Chinese page, I found that the Chinese page actually went much further in depth about certain topics like history. The Chinese Wikipedia page was quite a bit longer than the English version and contained some categories that the English one did not talk about. I looked up the stats about the Chinese Wikipedia page and found that there are roughly 1.3 million articles, 3.3 million registered users, and 67 people who have administrative privileges. With Wikipedia being totally blocked in China, it is very interesting to think about who is using the Chinese Wiki page and doing the editing on it.
Finally, one of the first things that you will notice on the Chinese Wiki page is that there is a big warning about how the neutrality of the article is disputed. I have not seen that on any other countries’ Wikipedia pages, and this was something that really stood out to me. Then I decided to look at a few users who have edited the Chinese Wikipedia page. The most interesting theme I found among the people who are editing that page was that they all have strong political views. One of the users actually had the fact that he was Anti-Communist party in his profile. After seeing the warning on the first page and then seeing how some of the people editing the page have strong political views, it is definitely fair to question whether or not the information is valid.
Sources
- https://slate.com/technology/2019/05/wikipedia-china-block-censorship-tiananmen-square.html
- Chinese Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Chinese_Wikipedia
- https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:YOintment